Memory of Memory
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
In the bottom drawer of the antique mahogany dresser, beneath yellowing letters and dried-up ink bottles, I found my grandfather's memory jar. The glass was cracked along one side, leaking wisps of silver-blue vapor that smelled like rain on asphalt and tasted like regret. The label read: "Summer 1987 - Do Not Open Until You're Ready to Forget Who You Are." Curious now, more than ever, I tested the vapor with a trembling finger, barely cool enough to pass my lips. I looked at its' reflection in the battered brass heating grate and saw a woman who didn't look enough like my father to be his mother. I wondered about the life she gave up, the mother who had to bury this thing built for living. I ate the vapor. Everything in the room shifted-- I went from seeing my grandmother's face carved mournfully in wood to a collection of some distorted image of everyone I'd ever known. No idea who I was to be looking at these people. I groped for an explanation, but all I found was a sickly nauseous whirl and the clack of my own tongue against my teeth. Then I was everywhere, stood witness to it in a cold sweat-- every confrontation, every deal that was struck; every vice; every mistake. Back and forth through time, I heard the swirl of tides in a cracked coffee cup, gasoline in dusk's green road glow, saw a man beating his dog to death with his boot heels, saw a man kick a sweet young girl across the room in nothing but her underwear. Woke in an apartment building burning to the ground while a child screams in the distance. The sun of a hundred different days shone dripping from a rubber hose. Saw both kinds of death-- tragic and mundane; the one where you never saw it coming and the one you wish you could forget; the one where you◆ About the ending
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